New Latin Peace Initiative Coming : Contadora Group to Try to Revive Central America Effort

Facing the prospect that two years of painstaking efforts may be doomed to fail, foreign ministers of the four-nation Contadora Group meet in Panama this week to try to revive a regional consensus about how to achieve peace among the five countries of Central America.

The strategy, according to informed Latin American diplomats, will be to lay aside a surprise negotiating document produced by three of the Central American countries last October that nearly derailed the talks.

Instead, the four Contadora nations--Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama--hope to persuade the Central American countries to go back and start talking again about the objections that they originally raised to a draft peace treaty circulated by the Contadora Group last September.

This, according to the diplomats, would restore flexibility to the talks and provide a wider latitude for agreement.

The Contadora initiative began two years ago at a meeting of the four foreign ministers on Panama’s Contadora resort island, which gave the group its name. At that moment, it appeared to many concerned Latin Americans that Central America was headed for a regional war.

Today, the Contadora Group believes that the avoidance of such a war is its principal achievement, but no region-wide peace treaty has been agreed upon.

The Contadora foreign ministers will hold two days of private talks Tuesday and Wednesday to open another round of mediation among Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Last September, the Contadora members believed that they had achieved a breakthrough. Nicaragua, which had raised many earlier objections, endorsed a draft peace document put together after a long series of meetings in Panama.

The Contadora mediators believed that they had finally come up with a plan that could overcome two fundamental obstacles to a practical solution: Nicaragua’s suspicions that it was being bullied into yielding to U.S. concerns and the belief of U.S. allies in the region that Nicaragua seeks to become Central America’s main military power in order to support revolutionaries in nearby countries.

Among the central features of the plan were an end to U.S. military exercises in the region--in effect, the removal of the American military presence from Honduras--and the eventual removal from the area of all foreign military personnel, including the Cuban advisers in Nicaragua.

Nicaragua’s announced approval caught the United States by surprise, and U.S. officials called it a “propaganda ploy” by the leftist Sandinista government. They said the plan required further refinement to eliminate flaws.

On Oct. 19, the principal allies of the United States in the region--El Salvador, Costa Rica and Honduras--produced a revised peace plan that not only contained their earlier objections to the original draft peace proposal but added new objections as well.

“We had expected ‘refinements’ to the plan,” said a Latin American diplomat familiar with the talks, “but not an entirely new plan.”

The revised proposal, drawn up in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, would permit military maneuvers in Central America by outside powers and make the removal of foreign military personnel a more ambiguous provision.

It also would create a new “international corps of inspectors” to investigate reported violations of the peace treaty, and it would eliminate wording in the draft that would allow Nicaragua to build up its armed forces to meet a perceived threat of invasion from the United States.

Daniel Ortega, the recently elected president of Nicaragua, has said that his government is not disposed to negotiate these points again, but Nicaraguan officials are said to have privately offered to continue talking on the basis of the original draft peace plan.

“Their view is that they will consider adjustments to the plan, but not a wholesale revision,” one Latin American diplomat said.

“If you look at the Tegucigalpa document as simply a delaying tactic,” said one senior diplomat who has attended the talks, “then you see that there is a basis on which to proceed. The delay has been achieved, and now we can go back to genuine negotiation.”

This diplomat conceded, however, that if El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica insist on continued discussion on their revised plan and if Nicaragua refuses to consider it, then the peace initiative may be stalemated.

“We would have to consider the possibility that what is lacking is a real willingness to achieve peace,” he said, “and under these circumstances, Contadora cannot function.”